Friday, April 10, 2015

Me on Kin

In the kin world, girls Ruby de Varre's age are expected to play nice, get betrothed, and start a family—especially if they're rootkin, and the fate of the clan is riding on them. But after a childhood of running wild in the woods, it's hard to turn completely around and be demure. Even if your Gran is expecting it. Then Conrad, handsome and charming, from a clan across the Waste, comes to New Haven to seal alliance between their two families. The sparks fly immediately. Conrad is smart, dominant, and downright gorgeous. Yet as Ruby gets to know him more, she starts to realize something's... off. Then, the murders start. A killer stalks the city streets, and just when Ruby starts to suspect the unimaginable, she becomes the next target. Now Ruby's about to find out that Conrad's secrets go deeper than she ever could have guessed—and it's up to Ruby to save her Gran, her clan, and maybe even herself....

Kin is a return to a place dark and mysterious where magic twists and turns its way around everything. It's the tale of a girl and her battle with her future, a life of control over a life of freedom.

Ruby is a welcome character. She's brash and bold, fun and caring. Cami and Ellie are everything to her, after kin. But things are different now. Ruby believes she's trapped, trapped between being who she is, a little wild and a little reckless, and being the next Clanmother, which means getting married and having babies as soon as possible. She feels this future is inescapable, so she capitulates in a way. She stops being Ruby and tries to be someone else. She hides from Cami and Ellie. She's in so much denial over everything that she's drowning in it, sinking so fast she can't tell how far away the surface is. It's Ruby lying to herself, pretending, that hurts her the most.

Each girl in each book has come fact to face with the wretched monster that is denial, that is lying to yourself because you think it'll make it easier for everyone else. With Cami, it was the shadows in her past. With Ellie, it was her stepmother's constant abuse. This time around, it's the hated future of popping out babies and never running free that changes Ruby. All three of them struggle to find the strength to push past it, to find that one moment that tells them they're free to be themselves.

Back to New Haven. Back to a town full of magic, of the Families and their dark secrets, to the rootkin and their connection to the moon, to the Charmers and the jacks and the Twisted out in the Waste. This world is lush, dangerous, and wonderfully crafted.

This has been a series of broken girls struggling to fix themselves, to find themselves, to find the strength to fight back against the people that attempt to push them down. They may lie to themselves, to others, they may hide, but in the end it all about them pushing forward and breaking free, no matter how painful it's been. Fans of fairy tale retellings, monsters with sharp teeth, and girls with sharper claws should definitely give this series a read.